Agreed. Those stipulations are what I was used to on Reddit and seemed to work for those communities there. Every post has something for free but there's a link to more that's paid. It's exactly how I found most of the content I've bought and subscribed to over the years.
Ben Milton’s take on traps is, I think, the best way to handle them.
Don’t use traps as a hidden thing. Make the trap itself obvious to the players, and describe it’s positioning. The trick should be for the players to figure out how to either avoid or safely disarm the trap.
One example he uses is a pit trap with a narrow board serving as a bridge over the top of it. The smell of volatiles indicates that there may be some kind of fuel at the bottom of it. The board is on a rotating mechanism, and if anyone tries to stand on or otherwise move the board, it ignites the fuel below with flint inside the mechanism, like a lighter. Since the pit is too large to jump across, players will need to find another way across.
In my own game, I recently pointed out a section of floor filled with skeletons whose legs were partially sunken into the tiles up to the knee. Since the sections of the floor were too long to jump across, they tested what was wrong by throwing objects onto the tiles and seeing what happened. Once it was clear that only objects that had been stationary for a few seconds sank in, they sprinted through the hallway and made it to the other side fine (one character lost a boot). They had fun, nobody felt it was unfair, and I would call that a win.
Unfortunately for them, the floor on the other side of this trap was greased, so they went sliding down a chute to the fourth floor of the dungeon, and had to look for a way back up, which came in the form of a previously inactive elevator that was a shortcut back to the first floor.
Sen’s Fortress in Dark Souls 1 is a good example of how traps like these can be utilized. They’re all obvious and easy to avoid, and serve more as positioning puzzles than as gotcha mechanics.
For years now i thought the details and the world building behind the campaigns is the most fun part, at least for me. After now three to four years building a world, without having my players play even one session in this world. I don’t deem my world ready yet. I think it’s never gonna be played. Its to much fun just creating the world. I don’t want my player find a loophole while playing and me having to fix it mid game with a not as perfect solution as it could be.
RE Battlemaps: strongly opposed to allowing them. Lemmy.world already has a battlemaps community. Ttrpg.network is welcome to make such a community too, I suppose. That content works for many more ttrpgs than dnd, so putting it in its own space makes more sense than allowing it in here.
RE artwork, if someone wants to post a hand-drawn scene of their group's epic win/loss against the bbeg, that's cool. I think we like seeing dnd success stories from folks, and a picture can be worth a thousand words. But, if that person is open for commissions, I would strongly prefer not to know about it.
IMO advertising needs to be segregated to opt-in communities kept exclusively for that purpose, much like LFG posts get their own space to mot pollute the general discussion.
(Similarly, links out to other sites that have comment sections, like youtube, should IMO be required to have actual supporting text content worthy of discussion, as without it they are just more advertising. That's outside the scope of the original discussion tho.)
Edit: RE homebrew--IMO it too should be sequestered, as it represents a divergence from everyone else's frame of reference.
Fine points on everything (minus links), but frankly, until people start actually posting content here, I would rather not splinter the community into more tiny communities. There are nearly 5000 users subscribed to this community, and yet every day 90% of the posts come from me be it news, official art, comics, etc.
Until the lurkers become posters, what’s the point of sequestering anything at all, If a member of !battlemaps posts something here, its 1 post out of 50 for the week.
We must drive more posting and sharing before we even consider breaking things out into their own communities, otherwise this community will be nothing but winging and whining about Hasbro/WoTC, 1 line questions with 1 line answers, etc.
Hopefully you understand what I am getting at here.
Oh, certainly! But then, I would avoid coming up with a policy at all until the amount of content reaches critical mass. If you're not ready for whatever will be the right policy, why bother enacting one that you know you'll have to walk back or ammend later?
nice, infinite dungeons. how will you deal with information about where the bbeg is located? wont the players want to know where the layer is to prepare or try a breakin without all keys? or is he just sitting around in a hidden hut until everyone is dead?
This was just part of an idea I thought I’d post since it sounded fun. I replied to the other commenter with similar questions but I’m not currently DMing otherwise I would figure that out.
I’ve bought this and it’s so long! 110 pages, of which 70 are the powers. It looks great but in classic MCDM style (Illrigger is super complex) it is hella crunchy.
The first issue is Death Ward. It basically negates a big downside of the item.
The item also doesn't seem that good for a desperation self sacrifice scenario. Most likely in any scenario where such a move is necessary the user won't be anywhere near full hp. Reducing the value of the item. The small range also severely limits the use of the item.
I would say in a lot of scenarios casting any aoe spell centered on the person would achieve more. A simple fireball is around 28 damage with much higher aoe.
The item requires a lot of planning and preparation to be useful rather than being an emergency item to get out of a tricky situation. Which isn't necessarily bad but goes against your inteded usage.
the low-hp scenario is why I included the bit about sacrificing death-throws for added damage. the idea is that if you sacrifice all 3 death throws, you’d have reached your massive-damage threshold anyways. WRT the AOE, its pretty big. assuming you don’t have any levels of exhaustion, and you want to survive, you get a 30 foot radius (5+5*5).
so say your character has a max HP of 90, but you’re down to 10, and you’re not exhausted (which is pretty common, i think). you could deal 70 damage to all creatures in a 30 foot radius, and still survive (unconscious, severely debuffed, and with 1 remaining death save). or 100 damage to all creatures in a 35 foot radius, and die.
but the fact that it wasn’t clear to you is a pretty good indication that this is probably too mechanically complicated to be actually fun :(
also you raise a good point about Death Ward. Thematically it would be fine - you’re “willingly sacrificing” your health, rather than taking damage, so apply it directly to your hitpoints rather than temp hitpoints, bypass all those kinds of defenses, etc… but that just adds even more mechanical complexity.
I have to admit I underestimated the damage a bit. I imagined it to be around 40 in most scenarios.
But I think streamlining the range wouldn't hurt. Instead of making it optional by expending exhaustion give it a longer base range and cause a fixed amount of exhaustion. Or perhaps make the user fall in a magical coma for X-time instead. Because I would say exhaustion rules are often ignored and I personally didn't even know how many levels there are and what they do.
I’ve been running a Star Wars DnD campaign since mid 2020. The 5e rules module incorporating SW5E.com content is top notch. It allows me to easily create battles with tons of low level minions that my players absolutely love mowing down.
How do I plan sessions? My campaign is less of an open world and more of a story. I always try to set up any puzzle/combat/scenario so that there are three ways to solve it. 1) way of the warrior (players just want to kick in doors), 2) way of the scholar/mage (players find a secret that allows them to mitigate or more easily defeat the boss), and 3) way of the scoundrel/investigator (a hidden exploit that allows them to completely bypass or nullify the problem).
I try to follow this strategy in fights, social intrigue, investigations, and so on. It can be as simple or complex as you want, although the more complex it is, the more likely your players will miss it. Many times it comes down to if-then analysis. I’ll describe a scene, my players will describe how they want to interact with it, and then I’m forced to think about how things would be in relation to what they want to try. Sometimes I will roll percentage dice to see how close the scene is to what players described (usually reserved for theater of the mind).
As far as setting up battlemaps, I’m really lucky. I’m a subscriber to Droid Cartographer, and he has a knack for creating map offerings of exactly what I need a few weeks to a month before I need it. I will try to set up each map prior to the session, and populate it with bad guys and so forth. Ctrl+C and Ctrl-V copy/paste.selected light objects and is a huge time saver. I do use multi-level maps, but sometimes stairwell and elevator tiles can be finicky when it’s game time, so I have to rest those maps thoroughly before using them (and even then half the time they are broken anyway). I also use ChatGPT for creating random NPCs, shop owners, minor party characters, etc.
Bottom line, FoundryVTT and ChatGPT have allowed me to save HUGE amounts of time with scene creation and NPC stat blocks so that I can focus on the story plot, and then allows a LOT of automating battles. This allows my players to feel epic and like the world is their oyster.
I don’t use ChatGPT for scene creation, but for creating stat blocks for minor NPCs. My scenes are all handwritten in a notebook unfortunately. I keep telling myself someday I will digitize them into PDFs/modules, but I’m at about 3 years of content right now 😬
There are a few good creators on r/battlemaps that have patreon subs available (with many freebies too on that subreddit). I also have purchased dungeondraft, but as of yet have not delved into creating my own maps. I generally find something “close enough” and then tell my players what specifically is different in the scene should it come up.
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